I’m working on a little diversion here- a side vent from the lava’s bubbling under current of Infernal.
Of course it’s for a show….yes, yes-I know I was no longer going to
participate in group shows for the foreseeable future-but when the
Dumbledore of Dark Art-Chet Zar invites you to the first ever Dark Art
Society show at Copro, you don’t hesitate.
What’s with the Gorgon then? Ah well…all will be revealed soon, but I
tell you my mind has felt like a nest of snakes (or in this case, eels)
lately. Restless, tangled, fermenting.
It’s been like painting my physiognomy manifest.
The show will be opening just in time for the feast of Samhain month,
and I’ll post full details along with the completed painting soon.
“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah”
The End-The Doors
“if art can’t tell us, about the world we live in, then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it.”
Robert Hughes-The Mona Lisa Curse
When I refer to my next series as “the Denouement”, I don’t just
merely mean as an end to a trinity that began over five years ago. I
mean it integrally. Entering this series, has felt like a final act, as
if I am just some artistic documentarian on the end times.
And it’s been no stretch, I can tell you-I mean, everything feels
like it is entering some sort of HBO grand finale now-even more
underwhelming than Game of Thrones, because as apocalypses go, it all
seems like business as usual.
An end of social norms, of known truths. Of civility. Of morality. Of
intellectualism. Of culture. Of America. Of a future. Meanwhile, the
worlds lungs are an inferno, Ice shelves the size of cities cleave into
the ocean, wakes are held for glaciers, and Russian reactors erupt,
spewing isotopes into the ether, while the bloviator in chief,
postulates the possibility of nuking hurricanes. All this as the
surface is scratched on a remote islands insidious underbelly, where an
almost Schnitzler like cabalistic rite of passage, caters to the most
vile of tastes and predilections for the rich and the affluent, as
another head count for the NRA’s coffers and coffins, beleaguers the
morning dreadlines.
It’s all too much to comprehend, particularly at 3am in the small
clutch of fevered hours,when it can seem like the doors and windows are
off their hinges and the tempests of chaos seem to rage through every
vestibule of your mind.
How does an artist navigate these times then, is what we are doing
enough or is it ultimately futile? Is the vantage point of being an
observer, as desultory as being a passive abstainer? Are we to be like
tinkers, commodifying the detritus of a socio political landfill, or
alchemists forging the degrado into Instagram gold? Is art’s objective,
to be just anthropological, a remnant from our own teetering Roman
empire, for some future generation to point fingers and disseminate as
some cautionary tale?
And round and around we go.
I read an article by Chris Hedges, The Artist as Prophet-in
which he says “The artist makes the invisible visible. He or she
shatters the clichés and narratives used to mask reality.” That’s some
lofty burden of ambition right there, and he cites quotes from novelists
like Russell Banks, and the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, but perhaps more of what he has in mind carries with it the weight of art like Goya’s third of May, or Picasso’s Guernica.
Except, how can art change the paradigm if it is purely post script?
Is art only simulacrum and how can it affect us and impart change?
I read with interest some years ago that the color pink, was being
used in certain Swiss prisons following a study by psychologist Daniela
Späth, as a sort of sedative. “A certain shade of pink calms the
nerves” she had posited, and in fact the statistical results bore out
that the inmates were less aggressive, once their cells were tinted
flaming flamingo.
For myself, I think I’d last five minutes before screaming blue
murder, but my point is that if art, with it’s collision of color and of
hue, form and concept is similarly a subjectively unconscious, sublime
experience, then any of its revelations must be transcendentally
existential -like codified transcripts that effect us on a psychological
level beyond our surface understanding. A kind of passive
aggression-or transgression if you will.
And so I believe that these times that we live in-as imprisoned and
terrorized as we feel, and so focused as the wardens seem on imminent
destruction-cry out for the retaliation of creation and the creative
impulse, more than ever.
For artists, it can be our greatest act of defiance and our most integral role.
“Healter Skelter”-24″ x 36″ – Oil on canvas (2012)
“I saw Elvis in a potato chip once.”
Fox Mulder, the X-Files
Today marks fifty years since the strata was jolted by news of the
Manson killings, and other than the brouhaha around Tarantino’s latest
desultory offing, it’s barely warranted a footnote in the press.
Unsurprising really, and frankly warranted, given the eclipsing daily
horror show in this country right now. Although, given that both eras
represent discriminate murders, initiated by cult members and galvanized
by the rantings of a deranged egomaniac, it could be argued that recent
headlines could give those of half a century ago a run for their money.
Still, I note the anniversary because of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna
showcase, that consumed me through much of 2012. Back then, bolstered
by a literary diet that comprised things like the hefty volumes of Peter
Levedna’s Sinister Forces, Adam Gorightly’s The Shadow over Santa
Susana, and every dank rabbit hole on the dark web-I crafted myself a
tinfoil hat so tight, I almost microwaved grey matter.
That’s not to undermine the revelations I made during that particular
artistic odyssey-I stand by what I said at the time, ” the connections
around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching
implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies
understanding”.
It does however give me a micro speck of insight, into the malaise of
modern conspiracy theorists; basement dwellers, pulling on threads so
to weave a magical carpet, and comfortably seat their confirmation
biases on.
For what began with conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination,
Roswell, the moon landing, Manson -has mutated and become the
provenience of alt right agitators from 4chan cesspits, promulgating
batshit schemes about Pizza parlors and the Earth being flat.
Or mass shootings as false flag events where the victims are crisis actors.
When ultimately, it’s all just another spiritual quest for understanding, a way to mollify the shared human guilt of barbarism.
In making Gods of our fears, and seeking sense of existence as a wasted
byproduct for some omniscient grand plan…one discovers there isn’t any
to be measured.
Killing is the ultimate zero sum, self destructive act where man is nihilist,and nothing divine.
You can read my musings from the series, in my book Rise-Man/son and
the Haunting of the American Madonna, available from the following link
or purchase a signed art print:
Man/son Art book
Healter Skelter Art Print
“Ignorance fears all things, falling, terror-stricken
before the passing wind. Superstition stands as the monument to
ignorance, and before it kneel all who realize their own weakness who
see in all things the strength they do not possess”
― Manly P Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry: Or the Secret of Hiram Abiff
Ala Prima| Oil on canvas | 9”x12”
Manly Palmer Hall then, peering from furrowed brow, as if he was
trying to cut glass with his eyes and looking for all the world like a
matinee idol from the Golden age. A sort of mystic Valentino for the
ages, or at least their Secret Teachings.
He’s another one of those forgotten esoteric figures on the fringe,
who along with Mathers and Blavatsky, are curios lost to the dusty back
rooms of new age bookshops, that no doubt used to line Melrose avenue.
And until a few years back, his magnum opus-The Secret Teachings of All Ages:
An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and
Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, would knock you back a few thousand
bucks.
Someone who described himself as a “last resort for troubled people”
his considerable acuity and palliative voice, lives on at least in
lectures on YouTube, which have been accompanying my painting marathons
for a while now. His Icosahedron based on the Golden ratio, even found
it’s way into my last series for my painting “The Origins of Death”.
In an era that feels like a “monument to ignorance”, the voluminous spiritual wisdom of MPH are like an antidote.
Painted Ala Prima in one sitting, it’s available for purchase from my store from the following link
MPH Portrait
“Christianity is a myth that has been literalised.”
Timothy Freke
Here I am at the opening act for what will be the grand guignol, for my very own book of Revelations.
The first of the last,the meanest story ever had then. Infernal, the Denouement.
For any end, there has to be an origin story, and with that in mind, I
suppose it was inevitable that my work would arrive back at the
beginning. I’m thinking of course of Theothantos, my artistic
fumbling’s through the quagmire of dogma and mortality. Dealing with
those questions back then, carried a lot of heft. With the burden of
weighing up the ultimate existential odyssey, I found it easier to
reduce the work to the abstract crevices of a skull.
As Henry Miller once pronounced when talking about Tropic of
Capricorn, he should have waited until the end of his career to do what
he’d tried at the beginning.
Perhaps a decade on, none the wiser, over fifty and certainly more world weary, I feel more able to put flesh on those bones.
And alongside Eliots The Wasteland- I’ve been drawing on some old
stalwarts for spiritual encouragement. Goya’s black paintings, Picasso’s
later years, Otto Dix’s war etchings, Grunewalds Corpus Christi,
Liverpool urban decay from the 70’s.
Perhaps it’s some sort of fait
accomplais, but I want the series to feel like it’s been produced from
the vantage point of an artist, journaling the end of days.
I wish I could say it feels like a stretch.
‘ The idea, that the piece of work is not finished until
the audience come to it, and add their own interpretation, and what the
piece of art is about, is the grey space in the middle-that grey space
in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about”
David Bowie talking about the internet (1999)
2008’s “Incarceration” looks like it finally hit it’s mark, albeit as
a meme, but shared no less than over 50,000 times regardless. It’s the
kind of stadium level exposure, that being on the cover of Juxtapoz
couldn’t have afforded me. Regrettably, the swine who originated the
meme, not only neglected to credit my work, but also cropped out my
name. Damn!
That would be some fuckery right there, except to say, I’m too old,
ugly and block worn to add it to the lifetimes list of personal
effrontery’s, back stabs and pass overs, to bend myself too much into a
pretzel about it.
I mean, go tell it to Da Vinci.
And as the better David predicted when he invited participating
members to download art from his website to rework and deface, it’s an
inevitable consequence of the web, that all culture is to be reclaimed
and co-opted.
If Art is the last truly democratic roar, then it’s one which has no
currency or cachet beyond the one afforded by the viewer, and as a
friend of mine supposed, it’s something of “a back handed compliment”
that a long forgotten work, has resurfaced and made such a remarkable,
reaching impact.
In these days of columns bloated with divisive opinion, its a measure
that my art was able to transcend the boundaries and be relatable on a
fundamental human level.
Regardless of the delivery of the medium, it continues to be arts greatest function.
Signed Prints of Incarceration available HERE
“Horrible things happening to people is inextricably linked to people thinking horrible things might happen to them.”
Ari Aster
Here we go then, once more into the breach, or the beginning of the end if you will.
Series three-“Infernal, The Denouement”-Dark Art Emporium 2021. And I
know it seems a ways off, but when you measure your hours in drying
paint, months can suddenly collide into years.
You can’t see yet, but this one is going to be about the plague-not
the black death you understand, but a disease equally as deadly. The
disease of what dear old Hitch described as something that ‘infects us
in our most basic integrity” and that is monotheistic, messianic
religion, or at least in its modern incarnation of white, right wing
evangelicalism.
Someone who understands this contextually is Ari Aster. His film
‘Midsommar’ on current release is a revelation. Coming off like a kind
of bastard offspring that comprises Holy Mountain meets the Wicker Man,
Aster is being deceptive when he refers to it as a “break up movie”.. A
break up of what exactly? It’s no accident that the female protagonist
Dani’s surname is Ardor and her boyfriends name Christian.
A film redolent with
runic rituals and traditions of the Nordic Thule, Aster is clearly
aware of its unsavory Nazi antecedents, peppering one of the early
scenes with book titles that are a masterclass in Blavatskian thru
lines.
In fact it’s a movie lush not just with sumptuous imagery, but a
spectacle of clues and pictographs. Art peers down from every corner,
echoing, lampooning,or predicting scenes, in what are a myriad of
illusionary incantations.
But it’s in the character of Ruben, the grotesquely deformed and
disabled child, who is the oracle, seen at the end sitting on a cotton
wool cloud, smearing paint abstractly on the pages of the communes
sacred book for the priesthood to decipher, where the true dark heart of
the story lies. It’s the mass delusion concocted from archaic ritual
madness. The assimilation of a community willing to participate in
terrible acts, following an insane edict, for the sake of prosperity and
genetic immaculacy.
And Ruben is it’s Godhead,
avowed as pure and divine-but an an inbred progeny regardless- whose
inflated lips seem to caricature the unmistakable, pneumatic sphincter
like pout of a former reality tv host. It’s an eviscerating parody that
at its core references eugenics and white supremacy-and as such is one
of the most profound statements for the times we live in. What
on the surface seems like a contemporary folk horror tale- is in fact
an indictment of the pernicious cult of racism and religion.
Having already seen it twice now, I can attest that it is a movie
that demands repeated viewings, if only because of how rich it is
symbolically, but it is also deeply affecting, beautiful, compelling
cinematic work.
It makes me spurred on by my own direction, having ploughed a similar furrow artistically with my piece “The Death Eaters”.
It’s a welcome reminder that as dark and bleak as this era is, there are
still seeds of extraordinary artistic expression able to inspire and
flourish.
